Biomarker validation company Abcodia provide the last in our series of guest blogs from BIO 2013 International Convention attendees. Mike Fisher, Abcodia’s Director of Strategic Alliances, describes how he hopes the BIO convention will benefit the company.

Abcodia Attendance at BIO 2013

Abcodia is honoured to have been judged one of the UK’s most innovative life science companies in a UK Trade & Investment competition, winning the opportunity to attend BIO 2013 as ambassadors of UK biotech innovation.

Curing Cancer by Catching it Early

Abcodia is a biomarker validation company with a focus on cancer screening. We passionately believe that diagnosing cancer early is the best strategy for improving mortality and enables the best treatment options. Our mission is to enable this through validated biomarkers for cancer screening and early detection.

Abcodia was formed in 2010 as a spin-out from University College London which operates a unique partnership model for provision of serum samples, patient data and experimental design expertise that does not exist anywhere else in the world. It has exclusive access to the largest blood serum biobank of its kind in the world.

The biobank contains more than 5 million longitudinal, pre-diagnosis serum samples collected as part of the UK Collaborative Trial in Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) which recruited 202,000 healthy women between 2001-2004. Additionally, 50,000 volunteers donated serum every year for up to 10 years. All volunteers gave informed consent for the samples to be used for research purposes, including commercial research. The health of the volunteers has been followed over the years, during which time many women developed various diseases. For example, we now have 27,000 cases of cancer within this large cohort. This unique biobank is therefore ideal for assessing how biomarkers perform years ahead of a standard diagnosis as we can effectively go back in time with our longitudinal samples to identify those markers that are elevated early in disease progression.

Global Partners Wanted

Partnership is key in our mission. We are developing our own products and hope that our first screening test will be on the market within the next couple of years, but there’s so much more we could do in partnership with other companies and academics that are trying to develop biomarkers. We have the samples that can validate biomarkers without lengthy and costly clinical trials.

We are also interested in working with the biotech and pharmaceuticals industry as our samples can be used to look for drug pathways that are elevated early in disease onset. This work will give strong evidence that new therapies would ultimately be front-line and could be used early in disease treatment.

Attendance at BIO 2013

BIO is the major commercial biotech conference on the international calendar and we see it as the best platform for Abcodia to develop collaborative global partnerships which will help us achieve our goals. We will be taking part in business partnering meetings and as many networking opportunities as possible. Please get in touch (Mike.fisher[at]abcodia.com) if you’d like to explore partnership opportunities with us.

We would like to thank UK Trade & Investment and the UK BioIndustry Association for all their generosity and support and we hope that Abcodia can fly the flag for the UK biotech industry.